Mix

Floating point fidelity, the
most flexible mixer architecture in the industry, hundreds of
plugins, and external control surfaces.

…and then go on to master and export your work.

Audio Engineers

Ardour's core user group: people who want to record,
edit, mix and master audio and MIDI projects. When you need
complete control over your tools, when the limitations of
other designs get in the way, when you plan to spend hours
or days working on a session, Ardour is there to make
things work the way you want them to.

Musicians

Being the best tool to record talented performers on actual
instruments has always been a top priority for
Ardour. Rather than being focused on electronic and pop music
idioms, Ardour steps out of the way to encourage the
creative process to remain where it always has been: a musician
playing a carefully designed and well built instrument.

Soundtrack Editors

Sample accurate sync and shared transport control with
video playback tools allows Ardour to provide a fast and
natural environment for creating and editing soundtracks
for film and video projects.

Composers

Arrange audio and MIDI using the same tools and same
workflow. Use external hardware synthesizers or software
instruments as sound sources. From sound design to
electro-acoustic composition to dense multitrack MIDI
editing, Ardour can help.

Audio and MIDI Multi-Track Recording and Editing

Any number of tracks and busses. Non-linear
editing. Non-destructive (and destructive!) recording. Any bit
depth, any sample rate. Dozens of file formats.

Plugins with Full Sample Accurate Automation

AudioUnit, LV2, LinuxVST and LADSPA formats. FX
plugins. Software instruments. MIDI processors. Automate any
parameters. Physically manipulate them via control surfaces.
Distribute processing across as many (or as few) cores as
you want.

Powerful Anywhere-to-Anywhere Signal Routing

Complex signal flows are simple and elegant. Inputs and outputs
connect to your hardware and/or other applications. Use
sends, inserts and returns freely. Connections can be
one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many. Tap signal flows
at any point. If you can't connect in the way you want with Ardour, it probably
can't be done.

Video Timeline

Import a single video and optionally extract the soundtrack from
it. Display a frame-by-frame (thumbnail) timeline of the video.
Use a Video-monitor window, or full-screen display, of the imported video in sync with any of the available ardour timecode sources.
Lock audio-regions to the video: Move audio-regions with the video at video-frame granularity.
Export the video, cut start/end, add blank frames and/or mux it with the soundtrack of the current-session.

Ardour Is Open

Ardour is an open source, collaborative effort of a worldwide team
including musicians, programmers, and professional recording
engineers. Development is transparent — anyone can
watch our work as it happens. Like a good piece of vintage
hardware, you can open the box and look inside. Of course,
you don't have to … but one day the fact
that anybody can will be useful.

This openness forces a kind of integrity on the project that
is hard to find in proprietary software, and helps us to
focus on issues and features that matter to our users rather
than stuff that just looks good in advertisements.